David Fuller, wearing a "Don't Frack Lafayette" t-shirt, listens during the Boulder County Commissioners meeting Thursday at the Boulder County Courthouse. Fuller was collecting signatures for ballot issue 75 on behalf of Colorado Community Rights Network. (Matthew Jonas / Longmont Times-Call)

Boulder County commissioners are delaying, until at least November, a decision whether to extend the county's moratorium on accepting and processing new oil and gas development applications.

The current temporary moratorium, which applies to unincorporated areas outside the county's cities and towns, began in February 2012 and has since been extended several times and now is set to expire next Jan. 1.

On Thursday, Commissioners Cindy Domenico, Elise Jones and Deb Gardner said that in the months between now and November, the county may get more clarity — either from a potential special state legislative session or in voters' decisions on one or more initiatives that may wind up on this fall's general election ballot — about how much local control over oil and gas operations the state's lawmakers and voters are willing to grant Colorado's cities and counties.

There may be more indication by this fall, as well, of the status or outcome of oil and gas industry lawsuits against municipalities like Longmont where voters have adopted bans on hydraulic fracturing, the commissioners suggested.

They also want more information about the potential health and safety impacts of drilling and oil and gas production, and the results of Boulder County Public Health visits to the industry's existing wells within the county.

"Our meeting today doesn't have as much solid ground as we were hoping to have," Domenico said, for coming to a conclusion whether to allow oil and gas exploration to resume in January or to put it off longer.

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A lot is "still in flux," she told the more than 50 people attending Thursday's meeting, many of whom are anti-fracking activists who have been calling for an outright county prohibition on using that process to extract deep-underground oil and gas deposits..

"We have six more months in this moratorium where we can hope for more clarity," Jones said, but "if we don't get it," the moratorium should be extended.

Domenico and Gardner also said that they're likely to extend the moratorium in November if enough of their questions aren't answered and concerns met by that point.

After the meeting, Mary Smith, a member of the Boulder County Community Rights Network group that's proposing that the county convert to a home-rule form of government that Smith's organization contends would have the power to ban fracking, objected to the commissioners' delay.

"They've kicked the can down the road until after the election," Smith said.